


your body as a tourist

by disco_vendetta (brinn)



Series: your body as a tourist [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon Compliant, F/M, I know too many geocachers you deserve this wake up call, M/M, i know those sound countintuitive but bear with me, i tried to think of the most embarrassing way to accidentally die and it's geocaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26019946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/pseuds/disco_vendetta
Summary: Bill is still sitting on the floor, back against the wall, where he was leaning and then just sort of deflated. “I don’t know what to do now,” he says, his eyes unfocused somewhere above Bev’s head. “I feel like I’m late for something, but I don’t know what.” A hank of hair falls in his eyes, that gray streak in the same place he used to get summer highlights from long days spent lazing in the quarry or the woods, so even now he doesn’t look old so much as sun bleached. The patina of age is shimmering on all of them.“We need to get rid of the body,” Mike says.(Or, the Losers wake up, and come home.)
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Series: your body as a tourist [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2109819
Comments: 8
Kudos: 100





	your body as a tourist

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings: the standard clown town warnings apply (death, dead bodies, mentions of suicide, suicidal ideation, medical trauma)
> 
> A/N: in case you've been here before, I've decided this one would be better served as a series rather than by chapters, so it's now a standalone!

_“There are things about you I collect and sell to no one.”_

_— Derrick Brown, “Pussycat Interstellar Naked Hotrod Mofo Ladybug Lustblaster”_

Bev guides Richie up the stairs like he’s a wayward drunk at a college party, Richie drifting in slow zig-zags like he just needs to sleep it off somewhere, like he won’t be sleeping off Eddie every day for the rest of his life. Mike thinks of Eddie, alone in the dark, under all that earth and water, and wants to cry. He could cry, no one would care, crying is, frankly, a pretty normal reaction to the everything they’ve done in the past forty-eight hours. (Crying is, frankly, a pretty normal reaction to the everything he’s done in the past twenty-seven years, to the nothing he’s done with his life.) But his body, wrung out of everything like a dish rag, won’t cooperate. He sags against the banister. He’s afraid if he sits down he won’t get back up, maybe ever.

“I made him take a couple sleeping pills,” Bev says, coming down the stairs to slump against the wood of the bar like the air’s gone out of her. “Eddie’s toiletry bag is a literal pharmacy.” She leans on her elbows and puts her face in her hands, her hair falling down in a tangled curtain, muck and quarry water sculpting it into lank octopus curls. “He’s sleeping in Eddie’s room,” she says, voice slightly muffled. “I think he wanted…” She doesn’t finish the thought, but Mike thinks of Richie’s face pressed into a pillow that maybe Eddie slept on for an hour or two, or maybe not, wonders which would hurt worse, cut deeper.

There’s a soft clattering and tinkling of glass and ice and Ben slides a cut-crystal glass under her chin. She takes a sip without opening her eyes.

Bill is still sitting on the floor, back against the wall, where he was leaning and then just sort of deflated. “I don’t know what to do now,” he says, his eyes unfocused somewhere above Bev’s head. “I feel like I’m late for something, but I don’t know what.” A hank of hair falls in his eyes, that gray streak in the same place he used to get summer highlights from long days spent lazing in the quarry or the woods, so even now he doesn’t look old so much as sun-bleached. The patina of age is shimmering on all of them.

“We need to get rid of the body,” Mike says, his voice a stranger to him. He doesn’t even realize it’s true until he says it, that old autopilot that carried him through the last year whirring back to life like a machine hum.

“The body,” Bill repeats to the ceiling.

“Bowers,” Mike says, clarifying, the name stale and cottony in his mouth.

“Jesus Christ,” Ben says, and rakes a hand through his hair, over and over again.Mike is momentarily transfixed by the slip of hair between Ben’s fingers, the grays threaded in the brown. “I forgot about fucking Bowers.”

“I thought you meant—“ Bev starts, her voice low and gravelly like she's been screaming, just wrecked.

“Bowers is still in the library,” Mike marches on. He can’t think of Eddie’s body, crushed into nothing by all that earth and water. Or worse. Somehow preserved in a pocket of air, sheltered by the surrounding rock, and falling apart all alone. (A line from a poem drifts across his memory like seaweed braceleting an ankle underwater, _I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones_. Every thought he tries to make is sluggish, his whole mind the hazy murk of a neglected fish tank. _I would let nothing of you go, ever_.)

Bill bends forward, slumps in on himself, his head against his knees. “It’s never gonna fucking end.” Something sparks in Mike at that, some caveman thought striking a flint in the neolithic dark of his hindbrain. He cups a hand around it to shield it from view.

“Someone has to stay with Richie,” Bev says in a monotone. She takes a sip of her drink, and then a gulp. “He can't be alone right now. I’m worried he’ll—“ She puts the glass down too hard, like she’s pinning the thought down, crushing it like a bug. “Someone should stay.” She knocks back the rest of her drink in two deep swallows, wincing at the end.

The glass, where she leaves it back on the bar counter, catches a thin scrap of watered-down sunlight seeping into the dark of the Townhouse lounge and throws a chip of rainbow up onto Bev’s cheekbone and she's so beautiful and he loves her so much and he _missed_ her so much that it knifes Mike’s heart, just _skewers_ him. He’s missed them so long he doesn’t know how to have them now, a starving stomach used to clenching down around nothing trying to reject solid foods as dangerous. But he can’t not love them fully, can’t not take enormous bites of them. He can't accept just a broth of them now, even if it hurts.

“You should stay here, Mike,” Bev says, shoving the glass away from her—the rainbow slips off her face like a teardrop. “You’ve handled enough bullshit for us. We’ve got catching up to do.”

Two opposing desires swirl into each other like brackish water: he wants to close his eyes and rest for the first time since he can remember, and he wants to never let them out of his sight again. He is so _tired_.

“It’ll look more suspicious if a bunch of strangers no one’s ever seen before are suddenly going in and out of the library,” he says, dragging his hands up and down his face, trying to wake himself up. “Everyone knows me, and they’re used to me keeping odd hours. I have to go.”

“Bev,” Ben says, his voice even grittier than its new, unfamiliar rasp. Mike remembers Ben’s voice as a kid, its softness, the careful enunciation that Mike had spotted immediately as a slight over-correction to an almost-lisp. Now Ben’s voice is rough, but still so gentle, like a large beast being very tender.

Bev looks up and sticks her jaw out, stubbornness locking up her shoulders.

“I not saying you shouldn’t. Just from a brute strength perspective, it’s probably gonna take all three of us to move…the body. Dead weight.”

Bev sighs through her nose and rubs hard between her eyebrows with her thumb, like she hunting a pressure point.

“You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m just—“ She makes a sweeping gesture with one hand. “I want to be doing something.”

“We need to decide what we’re going to say about…about Eddie,” Bill says from the floor. His eyes are unfocused looking somewhere past his hand where they’re draped over his knees. And Mike has always remembered them, that was the whole point, but Mike _remembers,_ suddenly, that look. That _look_ , that shock of hair flopping in his face, the absent part of his mouth, how when he got it it was like Bill was the only person in the whole world in _focus_.

“If we report him missing, or if we say we were all in Neibolt when it collapsed and he didn’t get out, or—I don’t know.” Bill leans his head back and it thuds softly against the wall. “If we say we were all there, then we’ll have to explain why we didn’t just call for an ambulance right away.” Is this what he looks like when he’s writing? Trying out plots and throwing them away? “We could say we were shell-shocked, but that only goes so far. Maybe we all went in to try and relive some glory days bullshit and we split up, hide and seek or something, and we didn’t realize he was missing until the building had already col-col-coll _apsed_.” Bill bares his teeth as he muscles past the stutter, frustration etched in every line on his face.

“Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be with us,” Ben offers, his hands back in his hair. “We only realized he must have come in after us when he never showed up at the hotel afterwards.”

Bill’s nodding, his faraway thinking face back on.

“That could work. We have _reason to believe_ he might have gone in there, but we can’t be certain. It would make sense to wait, then. To call the cops or anything. We have a few more hours before it would be strange not to go looking for him.”

“We’ll have to call around,” Mike says. He feels a thousand years old. “Hospitals and bars and—wherever it would be normal to look for him.”

“Every pharmacy in the tri-county area,” Bill says, his lips trying for something like a smile.

“His poor wife.” Bev says, her voice muffled, face in her hands again, and this time Ben comes around the bar to place one hand on her back, his fingers so wide on her tiny frame that his pinky and thumb stretch across both shoulder blades.

“Maybe…” Mike starts, the thought not quite a wish and not quite dread. “Maybe if they think he was in Neibolt, they’ll go looking for his body. Maybe they’ll find him. So she can have closure.”

“Fuck,” Bev hisses, jamming the heels of her hands against her eyes. “ _Fuck._ ”

“We should go now, while it’s still early,” Ben says, his voice apologetic to no one in particular. “Less people to see us.” It’s not even six o’clock, but the summer sun is sneaking higher every second, the light outside already more gold that grey.

“Yeah, we should get it over with,” Bill says, pushing himself to his feet. Mike hears his knees pop from across the room. “You’ll keep an eye on Richie?” He asks, looking at Bev. She nods, standing up to make her way back behind the bar, letting her hand drag across Ben’s chest on the way.

“I will, but I’m not doing it sober and you are just going to have to be okay with that,” she says, already reaching for a comedically huge bottle of vodka. She is so pale in the dim light, her skin almost translucent, deep purple under each eye, just a few shades off from bruises. Mike watches Ben watch Beverly, and again he _remembers_ , as sharp and immediate as pain.

“Call us if you need—“ Ben starts, and then cocks his head to the side, patting at his pockets. “Nope, my phone’s long gone.”

Bill blinks hugely, then shoves his hand in his pocket and yanks out what might generously be described as an ex-phone, mud-crusted, screen shattered, waterlogged.

“I think mine’s in my backpack?” Bev’s voice comes out as a question. She grabs herself another glass and pours glug after glug of the giant vodka bottle into it, splashing the bar top as she tries to manage the unwieldy thing one-handed while reaching for ice. “I’ll look. I don’t think I took it in with me. Write down your number for me, though, Mike, just in case. Do you see any orange juice?”

“There’s a mini fridge on the far right,” Ben says, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck.

Bev _hmm_ s and disappears under the counter for a moment, reappearing with an unopened bottle of Simply Orange (Some Pulp). She makes a face and shrugs. _What can ya do?_

“I left my phone at my place,” says Mike, who has an ounce of sense with regard to how sewers work and a significantly smaller phone-replacement-budget than these people.

“I’ll find mine and call Mike if something happens with Richie,” Bev agrees, taking a sip of her screwdriver. A screwdriver sounds nice. Mike could go for a screwdriver right about now, on his way to go scrape his childhood bully’s corpse off the floor of his workplace, where he lives. Bev holds the glass out, tilting her head towards him with a questioning eyebrow. He smiles, just a little bit, and takes the glass from her hand, her fingers cold from the ice and the juice bottle. He allows himself one swallow, wrinkling his nose up at the burn, and closes his eyes at the warm trail that glides down his throat like a heat score. When he opens his eyes, Bill is looking at him.

“Ready?” He says.

Mike hands the glass back to Beverly with a nod of thanks.

“Ready.”

They drive over in Ben's rental car, a shiny back SUV that he looks deeply embarrassed of, and park by Mike’s sturdy little pre-owned Volvo.

“Did you used to have a truck?” Bill asks suddenly in the exhausted silence of the car. “I keep remembering more bits and pieces.”

“Your dad’s truck,” Ben says, squinting like he’s trying to catch the memory. “Or your grandpa’s? It was like a tank.”

“My dad’s, originally,” Mike says, smiling a little. “God, I loved that truck. It finally died about ten years ago. It took five different mechanics to finally convince me it couldn’t be saved.”

They shuffle out of the car and through the side door, Ben craning his neck to look at the woodwork, murmuring something under his breath about turn of the century millwork. The Derry library really is a beautiful old building, and the foyer and the artifact display cases are working together to block the body from view.

But it is, without question, a body.

Mike blinks down at it.

“Who put a blanket over it?”

“Must’ve been Bev,” Ben says, kneeling down to peek under the blanket. It’s sticking up in the middle from the axe handle sticking out of Bowers’s head. _Don’t think about it_ , Mike tells himself. _It’s just an objec_ t.

He tries to remember what had happened (the book, the knife, the eyes in the dark, Bowers’s spit on his face, the sudden crushing weight, the knife the knife the knife). Bowers— _the body_ had slumped onto him and then Richie had thrown up and then Ben and Bev and Eddie had come running in, and he remembers wondering what was wrong with Eddie and Ben shouldering carefully past them to take hold of the tips of Mike’s fingers and bring his arm up to the light. Even with all the blood, Ben trying to fix what was immediately fixable.

“Shouldn't there be more b-blood?” Bill asks, squinting at the body suspiciously. “I feel like there should be more blood.”

“I think the axe is wedged in there so tight it sort of…stoppered it,” Ben says, looking a little queasy.

“Richie’s never done things…h-h-h-halfway.”

“We gotta be careful not to move that, or it could come loose,” Ben says, tilting his head, assessing. _An architect,_ Mike remembers thinking the first time he found the website for Hanscom & Associates, _Of course an architect. Of course._ “Do you have a shower here?” Ben asks, looking up at Mike. Mike blinks himself back into the room, with the body. “With a shower curtain?”

“Yeah, upstairs.”

“Okay,” Ben says, nodding before pushing himself back upright. “We wrap it in a shower curtain to start with. We duct tape it closed if we can. We can’t wrap it in a rug, or the axe could come loose—do you have a cabinet or something? Even just a big box.”

Mike thinks about his attic room (his _Attic Room!_ ) and walks through it in his mind. He has an old, low buffet table he keeps his mother’s records in. It was his grandparents’ and he’d be sad to see it go and so ill-used, but his grandparents also probably wouldn’t want him going to jail for manslaughter.

“Yeah. I’ll have to clear it out quick, but it should fit.”

“Okay,” Ben says, nodding again, his hair flopping into his eyes, and rolling up his sleeves. “We put the body in the cabinet, put it in the car, take a table and some shelves, a couple boxes. If anyone asks, we say you’re moving.” 

“Right now?”

“Yes,” Bill says, and Ben may be a solver, but no one could lie to authority figures like Bill, butter cool and unmelted on his tongue. “Yes, right now. We were here for a reunion, but we found out about St-stanley, so we went to Neibolt to remember him. Because our friends...our friend just died, and it made you realize how short life is. It made you rethink some things. So you wanted to make some drastic changes right away.”

“It’s easier when it’s true,” Mike agrees, and Bill stumbles for just a second at that, his blue eyes so naked in the filtered light. “You remember the way?”

“Yeah,” Bill says, and he has that particular Bill look again, like whatever story he’s trying to figure out is hidden somewhere in Mike’s face. “Yeah, I remember.”

Mike follows them up to his loft. He’s not sure why he wants to go last, except that he wants to remember them here, like this. His friends visiting his home, their hands sliding up the bannister, their feet drawing long creaks out of the floorboards. No blood, no fear. Just his friends in the sunlight.

They come up the narrow stairs and into the loft and it’s the first time since they all arrived that Mike’s slowed down enough to be self-conscious, and he sees his place how it must look to them—the teetering piles of books in every corner, notes and drawings tacked to every flat surface, his bed unmade under the skylight. His sees everything his life has added up to, and it's…sad. He is thirteen again and his skin fits wrong, his hands and feet are too big for his body. His face, his clothes, his body—all wrong. It feels like someone took sandpaper to every inch of him. He feels scraped raw.

He points to the buffet table and leans back against his desk, sitting on his hands to resist the urge to start panic-tidying, like it would make even the smallest bit of difference now. _I’m not normally like this_ , he doesn’t say. _There were whole swaths of years where I wasn’t like this_.

“It is still ob-objectively cool that you live in a library,” Bill says, crouching down next to Ben, who is already pulling out records by the handful and piling them on top of each other on the ground. “Keep them upright or they’ll scratch,” Bill says, setting the records up against the wall and pulling over a stack of paperbacks to hold them in place.

“Like this?” Ben asks, picking up the next handful of records, and Bill nods. “Yeah, Mikey, it’s like that book? The one where they run away from home to live in the New York Public Library?”

“ _From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Fr-fra-fra_ —fuck!”

“Frankweiler,” Mike says, “And they lived in the Met.” He knows if he tries to touch anything right now, he’ll drop it or break it or cause it to combust. The feeling, sandpaper on his skin, is fading with every moment he watches his friends be very gentle with the pieces of his life.

“I’d rather live in a library than an art museum,” Ben says, sounding like he’s giving it careful thought. “I’d be afraid of breaking something in a museum.”

“Yeah, that’s stressful just thinking about,” Bill says, then shudders. “I get clumsier the older I get.”

He leaves them, to go take down his blue and green map of the world shower curtain, a gift from some community drive five years ago. He very carefully does not look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He doesn’t want to know what he looks like right now, how haggard, how old. It’ll just make everything harder.

“Got the shower curtain,” he says, and Ben looks up from where he’s carefully moving a vase of dried flowers out of harm’s way.

“Perfect,” Ben says, nodding, wheels turning behind his eyes. “We’re gonna need some duct tape, and probably some plastic bags. Do you have any here, or do we need to go to the store?”

“No, I have some, hang on.” He ducks past them and moves some boxes out of the way to pull out his toolbox (Will Hanlon’s son might not need to fix his own sink anymore, but you better believe he knows how). He used to wear the roll of duct tape around his wrist like a bangle when he would take it to his grandpa to tape rags around a leaking pipe. He can’t quite remember when his hands got too big for it to fit. He has a plastic bag full of other plastic bags hanging from a hook in the kitchenette, and he grabs four just to be safe, checking each one for holes before bringing them over.

“Perfect,” Ben says again, and they each tip the cabinet onto its side so they can get it down the stairs. They scuff some antique wallpaper in the process, but Mike is too distracted to really care.

Ben spreads the shower curtain out flat next to the body and straightens. The three of them are stuck like that, staring, the reality that _they’re going to have to touch it_ crystalizing with every second.

“It’s just a thing now,” Mike says, more to himself than anyone else. “It’s just an object. We’re just moving an object.”

Rigor mortis has set in, which helps, keeping the limbs thoughtfully pinned against its sides where they fell. _(It’s just an object.)_ They lift it up—Ben and Bill at the shoulders, Mike at the feet—and half-drop it onto the plastic. It’s even heavier than he expected. _(An object.)_ Ben wraps the plastic around and instead of just scrunching the ends together and hoping for the best, like Mike would have done, Ben carefully folds the plastic flat over the feet like he’s making envelope and lays down precise lines of duct tape. The axe sticking out of the head presents a difficulty, but Ben gathers the plastic as close as he can around the handle and then tapes it in place. The plastic bags go over the axe handle, and he tapes the thin layers of plastic to the shower curtain, thoroughly, so no theoretical blood will leak out. The whole thing looks almost…neat. And with the opaque plastic, it could actually be some odd piece of furniture, one of the more ambitious Ikea lamps. _Just an object._

“This could actually work,” Bill says, almost laughing.

“Okay,” Ben says, opening the cabinet doors as wide as they’ll go and flexing his hands open and closed over and over. “Okay, okay, okay.” They pick up the body, the object, the thing in the plastic, it’s fine, and Ben maneuvers the front end in first, careful to arrange everything so the axe handle doesn’t knock against anything. There is a heart-stopping moment when the top of the handle bumps against the roof of the cabinet, but Ben just says, “It’ll fit,” his voice low and so certain. Spatial awareness is Ben’s whole job, Mike reminds himself, his hands sliding a bit on the plastic. If Ben says it’ll fit, it’ll fit.

The feet get stuck for a minute, Bill panting, eyes huge and panicked, and Mike has a horrible vision of them breaking the body’s legs to make it fit, the sound it would make, and he gets lightheaded. But Ben just pushes hard at the old wood and it gives the tiniest bit, just a millimeter or two, and the feet slide in, easy as anything.

“See?” Ben says, out of breath, eyes bright. "It fits.”

“Jesus Christ, let’s never do this again,” Bill says, dragging his hands over his face.

“We have to be careful now,” Mike says. He feels the weight of the body pressing him into the floor, almost exactly where he’s standing now. He feels hands pressing his face into the ground. He smells raw meat. Even dead, Bowers is still fucking up his life. He’s so _tired._ “That thing that happens in Derry, how people don’t see things…I don’t know if it’ll still work now that It’s gone. Maybe no one will notice anything strange, but…maybe not. We have to be careful.”

He looks up from where he’s been transfixed by the sight of the closed cabinet doors to find Ben looking at him. Ben has that architect’s look on his face, cogs and gears turning behind his eyes.

“We should put the cabinet and everything in my car,” Ben says. Then he nods, like he’s decided something. “The seats lay flat, there’ll be more room. Yeah, I think that’s best.”

“Okay,” Mike agrees, and that’s all they say for a while. They take the cabinet out the side entrance to where they’ve parked in employee parking spaces, Bill and Mike taking one end, Ben taking the other, Mike giving the occasional direction, left, right, watch for the step. Bill’s arms are shaking by the time they get to the cars, but he doesn’t lose his grip. They set the cabinet down with a thump, Bill letting go with a gasp, and Ben sets to work putting down the SUV’s back seats. They hoist the cabinet up again, tipping it onto its side as carefully as their straining arms muscles allow.

It fits so easily into the car that there’s a moment of dissonance where they all stand there staring at it, unsure what to do now that something’s actually gone right for once.

“Let’s get a few more things to fill it up,” Ben finally says, stripping off his flannel shirt and tossing it over the cabinet.

“Right,” Mike say, “I’m moving.”

Bill pauses on his way to Mike’s bathroom, staring at the bed, a sturdy four-poster Mike found at an estate sale for cheap. It hadn’t made sense to push it under the lowest part of the sloped ceiling, but Mike had wanted to sleep under the skylight.

“When this part is done, let’s all go back to the Townhouse and just sleep for, like, a day. Let’s just all agree to do nothing but s-s-s-“ He grimaces, baring his teeth like a dog. “ _Rest_ ,” he finishes. He makes a loose fist with one hand and presses his knuckles into the wood of the bed post. “ _And still insists he sees the ghost,_ ” he says, his voice almost inaudible, but so precise.

Mike does not say that for a long time, he would stretch out under the skylight, the moon almost too bright to sleep, thinking how it was already morning in England, that whatever the moon had seen Bill doing was orbiting back to Mike now, some vapor of him drifting down overhead. He does not say that he stopped because he could feel the loneliness metastasizing in him, that if he kept rolling the shape of it around in his mind he wouldn’t make it. He does not say that he doesn’t have a room in the Townhouse. He does not say, _You could just sleep here_.

He lets Bill walk away, like he always has. Crouching down, he pulls a few boxes out from under his bed until he finds the lockbox with all his important papers in it.

“Hey, is that us?” Ben asks, crouching down next to one of the unearthed boxes to pull out a photobooth strip sticking out of a hardcover book.

“Oh yeah, that’s my box of you guys,” Mike says with a soft laugh. He should probably feel embarrassed or exposed, but his adrenaline has spiked and dived so many time in the last forty minutes that he’s too tired to feel much of anything anymore. He sits down on the bed and Ben sits down next to him, pulling the box between his scuffed work books to rifle through it.

There’s a few pictures from when they were kids, but most of it is artifacts Mike collected of their adult lives, most from before the internet made keeping track of people easier, little talismans to prove that they were real. There’s a whole stack of magazines, including a copy of _ELLE_ with the first article Bev was ever featured in, a little scrap of fabric marking the page.

Ben pulls out the copy of _Architectural Digest_. He flips to the main article, where there’s a two-page spread of a living room with high, arching ceilings anchored with thick beams, everything done up in shades of cool gray.

“I remember this,” Ben says, laughing a little. “I was only supposed to be there to talk with the writer and give them the tour, but they made me be in some of the pictures, too.”

“Yeah, cause they’re not stupid,” Mike says, fond.

Ben flips to the next page where there’s a picture of himself next to a soapstone kitchen island, soft light filtering through an overhead light, copper pots gleaming on a rack behind him. A pull quote is blocked in on the opposite page: _“When we were planning the house, I imagined the kids who would live here, how no one knows a place like kids know a place, all the little nooks and crannies…I moved around a lot as a kid, so as much as I enjoy open floor plans, I’m someone who understands the relief of having walls, private spaces, doors that lock. I’m attracted to the idea of hiding places.”_

Ben puts the magazine away, blushing, and picks up a used DVD case with a microphone surrounded by flames on the cover, varsity-font proclaiming _Comedy Central Presents: Lowest Common Denominators!!!_

“Richie?” Ben asked, his eyebrows quirked in concern.

“It’s the first special he ever had a segment on. Eddie and Stan made it hard to keep track of them, but you guys were easy.” He taps the fat pile of _Vogue_ s. He had impulsively wanted to buy one of Bev’s pieces when her first real collection had come out, but they were Clothes, so far out of his price range it was actually funny. He’d gotten halfway through setting up an eBay alert for second-hand sellers before he decided that it was sad instead of sweet, to be that desperate to touch something that had maybe been touched by someone he loved.

Ben picks up a fat hardcover of _The Black Rapids_ , and flips through it absently, smiling at Bill’s author photo—the floppy hair, the chin resting thoughtfully on the hand, staring into the middle distance.

“Is he in a _graveyard?_ ” Ben asks, sounding horrified and delighted.

Mike grins. A designer sweater he was never going to wear might have been a bridge too far, but it was actually easy to get autographed copies of Bill’s books. There were always bookstores doing promotions when a new one came out, little _“signed by the author! 25% off!”_ stickers in the corners. He used to touch the swooping letters of Bill’s signature like a talisman, like the finger bone of a dead saint, trying to catch some tiny sliver of Bill that might have worn off in the writing, had touched his own hand exactly where Bill’s would have had to rest, however briefly. 

“It could be worse. I have a laminated print out Eddie’s LinkedIn profile somewhere. The picture is alarming, but it was all I had to work with.”

“What’re you guys looking at?” Bill’s voice cuts in.

“Oh, nothing,” Mike deadpans. “Just _this_ guy. So _serious_.” He holds the book open to Bill’s picture.

Bill’s eyes go wide and horrified. “There were extenuating circumstances! My agent made me!” He tries to grab the book out of it hands, but Mike snaps it shut and holds it at arm’s length behind him. Bill lunges for it anyway, bracing a hand on Mike’s shoulder and reaching for it, even though his arm’s half a foot shorter than Mike’s. He’s balanced on one leg, his thigh pressing against Mike knee and Mike can feel his laugh reverberating down through his body. _He smells the same_ , he thinks, and since when does he remember how Bill _smelled_ , but he does. At the exact same time, Bill loses his precarious balance and tips forward over Mike’s shoulder, his leg sliding up Mike’s, his torso smacking into Mike’s chest with a soft _oof!_ as his momentum propels them over. There is a split second where Mike thinks _I could stop this, I could catch him, I could hold him upright_. He can feel his sheets and blankets under his hand. Bill smells the same. He lets himself fall.

“… _Ow_ ,” Bill mumbles, voice muffled from how his face is mashed into the mattress. Mike laughs at the ceiling.

“Egg, I dreamed I was old.” If he turned his head to the side, he could press his face into the shallow dip where Bill’s ribs meet at the center of his chest.

He doesn’t. But he could.

“You are a _nerd_ for making that reference,” Bill laughs, stomach shaking against Mike’s elbow.

“You’re a nerd for _getting_ that reference,” Mike shoots back. His hand is loose against Bill’s knee.

“ _Dispatch we have a situation,_ ” the police scanner squawks to life, startling all of them, Bill’s whole body jumping against Mike’s, almost rolling off the bed as Mike sits upright through sheer force of muscle memory.

“Shit,” Mike hisses, “I forgot about—“

“ _Dispatch, we have a body_ ,” the voice on the scanner crackles, and they freeze. Mike’s tipped towards the dip Bill’s weight is leaving in the mattress. They were so careful, someone must have seen Bowers on the floor when they were in Neibolt, must have told them to check the cars. It’s too soon, he just got them back, it’s not _fair_ —

“ _Caucasian male, about…one-fifty, dark hair, five-foot…nine? Maybe five-foot seven?”_

“Eddie,” Ben croaks, his voice heartbroken. Mike can feel his heartbeat thudding in his chest like he’s underwater, and makes himself exhale. It’s not Bowers, no one knows where Bowers is. They’re safe. They’re all safe. Except for Eddie. Except for Stan.

 _“He hasn’t been in the water long, T.O.D. looks recent—JESUS CHRIST!”_ There’s a wash of static and a horrible feedback screech that has them all wincing, frozen in place. _“Dispatch, I need an ambulance to my location, I repeat, I need an ambulance to my location!_ ”

“What—?” Ben’s voice cracks. “What’s happening?”

Mike can feel Bill’s breath on the back of his neck.

“ _Medical, please be advised victim has severe trauma to the chest, pulse weak and erratic—_ “

Pulse. The victim has a pulse.

“Jesus Christ,” Mike whispers. “Jesus Christ, he’s alive.”

Mikes is outside himself, sees the three of them crowded onto his bed, sees Ben’s silhouette lit up gold at the edges against the sun spilling through the window, sees the impossible blue of Bill’s eyes staring at the radio, sees how close his hand is to Bill’s, the moment frozen in amber. He will take this moment out and look at it for the rest of his life, a jewel in a case.

Then they’re moving. He doesn’t remember going down the stairs, doesn’t remember locking up (did he lock up?), he is suddenly, somehow in the passenger seat of Ben’s car, fumbling with the seatbelt, Ben already throwing the car into drive, sending Bill rattling like a teacup where he’s wedged in the backseat between the furniture.

“Call Bev, someone call Bev,” Ben says, distracted, hitting the brakes too hard at a stop sign, jerking them all against their seats. “We have to get to the hospital, where’s the hospital?”

“Keep going down Main Street until you hit the stop light, then go right,” Mike says, fumbling for his phone. He enters his passcode in wrong twice before he manages to get it open, his fingertips numb and clumsy. Bev answers on the third ring, her voice quiet.

“Mike?"

“Bev,” he breathes, afraid to say it out loud. “Bev, Eddie’s alive. We think—we heard it on the police scanner, we’re going to the hospital, we’ll pick you up—no, there’s no room, can you take Richie’s car?”

There is silence from Bev’s end, and then a muffled crash, and then her stuttering breath.

“Mike…are you sure?”

“We’re going to the hospital right now, we might even beat them there, we’ll know for sure when we get there, get Richie, and we’ll—“

“We can’t tell Richie until we’re sure,” Bev says, and her voice is clear, steady. “Mike, if we tell Richie that…and he’s not…Mike, I don’t Richie will live through it twice.”

Mike’s heart stops in his chest. Oh God, oh _God_ , if they give Richie hope and they take it away, if it’s not Eddie, or if it _is_ and he’s already gone—he feels Richie straining against his grip in front of Neibolt, pressed against his chest and shaking with sobs in the murky quarry water, the lack of absolutely anything in his eyes when he let Beverly put him to bed like a child. No.

No, Richie won’t come back from this if they’re wrong.

“You’re right,” he makes himself say. “Jesus, you’re right. Okay. We’ll go to the hospital and we’ll…find out, and we’ll call you when we know.”

“Okay,” Bev says, her voice tight and brittle. “Mike, as _soon_ as you know.”

“Yes,” he agrees. “We’re pulling up now, I love you,” he says and hangs up. He doesn’t even have time to be a little embarrassed about that, they’re already spilling out of the car and sprinting towards the doors of the ER. They crash into the front desk and a sixty-ish woman with a pale blonde perm looks up at him and smiles, like she sees this every day.

“We think—“ He gasps for breath, how does he even say this? “We think our friend was just brought in, or is being brought in, he’s white, five-nine, slight build, he’s forty—“

“This is him,” Ben says, holding up Mike’s phone (when did he get Mike’s phone?) zoomed in on what he instantly recognizes as the picture from Eddie’s LinkedIn profile, the forced smile, eyes huge and impatient. “Has he been brought in?”

“Please take a seat, I’ll speak with our team in the OR and see if we can get some answers for you,” the woman says, still so calm, as she holds a phone between her ear and shoulder, fingers typing with practiced speed.

At this point, Mike loses the plot a little. He hears Ben, that soft, gruff voice—“He broke his right arm when he was twelve, it should be in his record, it would show up on x-rays—“

Bill, so frantic his stutter is cutting in and out like static, pulling up the same four public facebook photos over and over again and showing them to nurses who tell him, over and over again, that the patient is in surgery, that they’ll have answers for him soon, if he could just take a seat and try to be patient, they know it’s difficult, can anyone get them anything? Do they need some water? Were they in an accident, too?

Mike hears himself say, “Have you heard of geocaching?” and spends the next ten minutes wondering how _he’s_ heard of geocaching, of all the white people _nonsense_ to lean into as an alibi.

Time dips in and out, the fluorescent lights overhead flare and fade. A woman in dark blue scrubs and a white coat comes out into the lobby, hair pulled back tightly from her face. She looks tired, but she’s smiling.

“Your friend came through surgery just fine. The damage was a lot less severe than it initially appeared.”

“And you’re certain?” Bill asks, holding up Mike’s phone with Eddie’s picture again, his voice too loud in the quiet space. “This is the man who was just brought in, who you—operated on?”

“Yes, Edward Kaspbrak is in our system via his insurance provider, there’s a patient ID photo attached to his file.” Mike’s knees decide that that’s about enough of that and he crumples into a chair.

“We’ll have more news for you in a little bit, I just wanted to let you know he came through alright,” the doctor—doctor? nurse? Is it usually doctors who come talk to people? Was _ER_ accurate on that point? Whatever happened to Maura Tierney? Jesus _Christ_ , get it together—keeps talking while Mike gently grabs Bill’s clammy wrist to take his phone back. His numb fingers fumble with the numbers. She picks up on the first ring.

“Bev,” he says, cheek slipping with moisture. When did he start crying? “Bev, it’s him.”

Bev’s gasp crackles through the phone and he hears a huff of breath that means her legs probably went out, too.

“Okay,” she says finally. “Okay. I’ll—I’ll wake up Richie and I’ll drive us over. Jesus, that’s gonna be a nightmare. Okay. Where are you?”

“We’re in the ER lobby, you’ll see us when you go through the doors. Do you need directions to the hospital?”

“No, I’ll pull it up on GPS. I don’t…I don’t even know how to tell him. What do I tell him?”

Mike closes his eyes and thinks of Ben and Bill, their shoulders moving through the sunbeams in the library, dust motes catching the light like fireflies. He thinks of the long succession of days before this one, a wall of gray in his memory, the flat landscape he dreamed through for twenty-seven years. He opens his eyes and Bill is looking at him, and everything else is a blur.

“Tell him it’s time to wake up.”

He hears Richie and Bev before he sees them, the slap and squeak of running feet, Richie’s voice just saying, _“Where?”_ over and over. He sees Bev first as he turns and her hair is the brightest thing is the whole room, the gleam of copper so sharp it’s startling. She’s showered, he thinks, and changed clothes, a different pair of dark pants and a too-big t-shirt and the same water-logged sneakers. She’s barely keeping up with Richie, who’s in the same clothes, unshaved, hair dirty, his long legs eating up the distance. His eyes behind his cracked glasses are huge, wide and wild like a frightened animal’s.

Like those last two pieces snapping into place summoned her, the doctor in the blue scrubs is back. She seems unfazed by Richie visibly teetering on the edge of something.

“The patient is currently sedated and resting in a private room though here. We’d like to wait a little longer before allowing visitors in to sit with him, but you’re welcome to see him and then take a seat in the waiting room next door until a nurse comes to find you. You can follow me.”

They all stumble after her, Bev keeping one hand on Richie’s arm, trying to steady him, to slow him down.

The door to the small room starts to open and Mike looks at Richie and the bottom drops out of his stomach. What if the doctors were wrong? What if it’s someone who _looks_ like Eddie, dozens of bodies drifted out of that sewer when they were kids, what if it’s someone else, someone the police missed, what if it’s not—

He catches the thought in his hands like struggling bird, makes it hold still, stop throwing itself around his ribcage. If it’s not Eddie, then they will take turns with Richie for as long as it takes, Mike doesn’t have any other plans for the rest of his life, keeping Richie alive can be his new purpose, he can do it, he’ll do it—

Richie’s knees hit the scuffed white composite floor. Bev and Ben are there in an instant, pulling his arms over their shoulders, taking his weight. Bev is doubled over after two steps and Mike startles out of his stupor, ducking in behind her and nudging her out of the way. He helps Ben lever Richie into a chair where Richie folds in on himself, just _crumples_ , glasses on the floor, hands over his face. Bev drapes her body over his like a blanket, rubbing his back. Ben and Bill huddle in around them, shielding Richie from view. Mike takes the last unprotected side, one hand on Ben, one hand on Bev, cutting off everything that isn’t the five of them. Nothing else is real.

 _Didn’t they just do this? Weren’t they just here?_

“He’s okay,” Bev croons, and it take a second for Mike to figure out she’s talking _to_ Richie, not _about_ Richie. “He’s gonna be okay.”

Mike doesn’t pray a lot, never has, asking for things from anyone was impolite in the extreme in the Hanlon household, much less asking for things from _God_.

 _“The most important prayer you’ll ever say is ‘Thank you,’”_ his grandfather used to tell him, his face so serious that it stilled even Mike’s little-kid perpetual motion, held him in place with the gravity of it.

 _Thank you_ , he says silently to anyone who feels like listening. _Thank you_.

They’re ushered into a new little sequestered waiting room. It’s nice. It has a fish tank.

Richie zeroes in on a little Keurig in the corner and makes himself a little paper cup of watery coffee with the grim efficiency of a factory worker. He drinks it down in big sips, without pausing, and immediately starts making another.

“I was three hours into about half a bottle of trazodone,” he says when he turns around and sees their faces. “I’d be snorting the grounds straight outta the k-cup if I could.”

“Jesus, Richie,” says Bill, wincing as Richie throws back the rest of the steaming hot coffee like a shot. Richie shrugs, throwing his free hand up.

Bev sits down heavily in one of the upholstered chairs, next to Mike, raking her fingers through her hair while she watches the fish. Ben blinks at her for a moment, and Bev catches him staring.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” Bev says, not looking sorry at all. “I packed in a hurry, I needed a clean shirt.”

“No, that’s—that’s fine,” Ben says, blushing.

“At least one of us packed the right stuff,” she adds, and that apparently means something different to Ben than it does to Mike, because the blush spreads down his neck like a water stain as he ducks his head. Mike turns his head to hide his smile and tries to catch Bill’s eye, but Bill is looking at nothing, his expression distant. He frowns, then, focusing on something down the hall.

“Guys,” he says, and they all follow his gaze to see a nurse coming down the hall with purposeful strides, and behind her—a cop. There’s a cop walking towards them. Mike’s hands go cold, and he feels a wash of staticky numbness in his elbows, behind his knees, the tops of his feet.

“Ben,” Mike croaks in a whisper, horror bubbling up inside him like a spring. “Ben, it’s still in your car.” Bev sucks in a gasp of air. None of them move.

“Mr. Hanscom? Mr. Benjamin Hanscom?”

Ben stands up, angling his body between the woman and Richie, and places one hand to squeeze Mike’s shoulder. He is so calm. And Mike realizes in that moment that Ben is going to try to fix it. That if someone has to go down for Bowers, Ben is going to make sure it’s him, and Mike can’t breathe, he can’t let him do it, but if it’s not Ben then it’s Richie. And even then, it still probably won’t fucking matter, Mike is the weirdo loner librarian, Mike’s the only Black person he sees most days, but Ben’s thought of that, too. The body is in Ben’s car.

That’s the hand on his shoulder, Mike realizes. That was Ben’s voice in the library, _We should put the cabinet and everything in my car_ , those gears turnings and turning behind his eyes, building a structure that could hold. _Yeah, I think that’s best_. That’s Ben reassuring him, that’s Ben standing up to fall on a sword that isn’t even his, and Mike can’t do it, he can’t let them get taken away from him again. 

“Mr. Hansom, you’re Mr. Kaspbrak’s emergency contact.”

“I’m...what?” Ben is so thrown that he just stares, mouth open, momentarily at a complete loss. His hand in Mike’s shoulder goes slack. The nurse smiles, her expression patient and warm.

“You’re listed as Mr. Kasbrak’s emergency contact in his paperwork.”

“I...okay. Okay. What do you need from me?”

“The officer here found your friend. He just has a few questions for you before he leaves.”

The police officer shifts his weight around, a meaty high school football player’s body, and fishes a little notebook out of his pocket.

“Mr. Kaspbrak was found in the water near the runoff point of a local cave system. Our best guess is he was inside when there was some sort of structural collapse.”

“Yes, we were…” He glances at Mike. “…geocaching. We—we got separated. We didn’t know Eddie was still in there.” And Ben still isn’t a great liar, but hell, Mike can’t blame the nurse for trusting those big, sad eyes without question. The fact that with the exception of Bev, who has showered, they currently absolutely look like the kind of people who would go geocaching is working in their favor.

The nurse nods, and pats his arm comfortingly. Mike watches the policeman mouth the word _geocaching_ as he writes it down.

“Was there anyone else in there, or nearby, that you know of?” The policeman asks, pen pen poised.

“No, it was just us. We’re in town for a reunion. We grew up here.”

“Not much of a welcome home,” the officer says, sympathetic. Ben smiles, looking pained.

“No,” he agrees.

“Will you be able to contact his family or loved ones? Let them know where he is?”

“Yes,” Ben says, his shoulders starting to relax with each question that isn’t _‘Care to explain the dead body in the trunk of your rental car?’_ Ben answers a few more questions, rattles offhis contact information. Mike makes himself breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth. He realizes his knuckles are aching, and unclenches his hands. Bev puts her hand on his knee, her eyes still on Ben’s back. Mike slips his hand over hers. She squeezes hard enough to hurt. The pain of it feels good, though, focuses him in the room, in his body.

Finally, the police officer leaves to continue the good work of crime fighting in Derry, and the nurse herds Ben back into the circle of their bodies.

“So, here’s where we are: your friend suffered a trauma to the thoracic cavity. It appeared he was impaled—” And apparently that’s the actual medical terminology, _‘impaled,'_ Eddie’s not going to handle that well. “—by something, we think maybe a piece of rebar, there’s a lot of old construction in those caves. In normal circumstances, blood loss would have been so severe that it would have resulted in death in just a few minutes, but it appears that almost immediately after he sustained his injuries, the pressure of the water flooding pushed him into the silt bed. The dirt and particulates were pressed into his wound with such force they actually formed a sort of mud pack—essentially, it sealed the wound well enough to keep him from bleeding out, and the water itself was so cold underground that it slowed his heartbeat enough to prevent him going into shock. He’s stable now, and he’s received blood, so our biggest worry now is actually infection.”

“From the sewer mud,” Bill clarifies.

“Yes.”

“The sewer mud that vacuum-sealed his su-sucking chest wound.”

“Yes.”

Ben, in the calm voice of someone circling back in a meeting, says, "When he wakes up...whatever you tell him? Don’t tell him that.”

Richie puts his hands over his face laughs until he cries.

“I know we should call his wife,” Ben says, “but I think we should wait until Eddie can talk to her himself. I just—I don’t know how he wants to explain this.”

They’re in the same little waiting room where they’ve been for hours. Richie is so exhausted and so wired he keeps squirming in his seat, getting up, pacing, slapping his cheeks, rubbing the heels of his hands up and down his arms or the front of his legs. They can’t leave, not until they’ve seen him, seen him for real, not just through a doorway. Not until they’ve touched him and felt his beating heart.

They are all very, very aware of the body still in the back of Ben’s car, the summer day getting hotter as the sun rises.

Bev is drowsing on Ben’s shoulder and Mike is nodding off in his chair again when the their nurse friend comes in, smiling wide.

“He’s awake. He’s asking for you.”

Richie jolts like he touched a live wire, his hands spasming in the air like he’s reaching for Eddie through the wall.

“Now, he’s still sedated, and he’s pretty loopy,” their nurse—Marcia, her name tag reads, her name is Marcia—“So don’t worry if he seems a little out of it. And he’s going to get tired very quickly, so try to keep it pretty short. One or two of you can stay with him while he rests, though.”

They shuffle themselves inside the room, barely fitting. The bed is in the center of the small room, the barrier up on one side, the other open where wires and tubes are twisting like weeds, and propped up in the bed, his body like a center of gravity: Eddie.

He’s actually paler than the sheets and his hair is well and truly a mess, sculpted at an insane angle on one side and flat to his skull on the other and he’s the best thing Mike’s ever seen in his life since Bill walking through the door at Jade of the Orient.

Eddie squints at them, eyes puffy and dark. He seems to be considering them very carefully, choosing his words.

“Yo.” His voice is a tearing-metal creak, but he nods, pleased with himself. Mike’s cheeks hurt he’s smiling so hard.

Richie half sits, half falls into the chair next to him and grabs his hand, long fingers careful with the wires and catheters. Ben comes around on the other side, Bev squeezed in next to him. Mike stands next to Richie, Bill at Eddie’s feet, grinning.

“‘Yo?’” Richie wheezes, borderline hysterical. “ _That’s_ your grand Fun-Size Lazarus opener?”

Eddie, who is off in _space_ , rolls his head around on the pillow, eyes trying to focus and managing exactly nothing.

“Richie,” Eddie says very clearly, even though he’s looking at Ben. Richie jolts again, his expression so naked Mike has the absurd urge to cover him up, shield him from view like in the ER lobby. “Tell Richie I would’ve done it.”

“Okay,” Ben says, holding his hand. “But you can tell him yourself, he’s right here, he’s holding your other hand.”

Eddie nods very seriously, like he’s agreeing with his boss. “That’s very true,” he says, and goes to sleep rather definitively.

Richie puts face down on the bedspread next to Eddie’s leg, shoulders shaking. There’s no real way to tell if he’s laughing or crying. Mike rubs a hand up and down his back.

“We should take care of that thing now,” Bill says when it’s clear Eddie is out for the count.

“We should,” Mike agrees.

They stay another half hour anyway. You have to taste the victories when they come.

They stop at an Ace Hardware, where Ben proceeds to buy a handsaw, two bottles of kerosene, a box of matches, and some painter’s tape. Bill picks up a bundle of firewood and fixings for s’mores.

“So we have a r-r-r-reason to be out there, if anyone sees the smoke,” he explains, defensive, at their looks of alarm. “I’m not a _sociopath_.”

The drive out to the Barrens is quiet, and Ben rolls the windows down so the warm summer air ripples across Mike’s face like water. If it also circulates the air in the car that is maybe starting to smell like…something, they don’t mention it. It really is a beautiful day, the greens and blues so bright and so vivid Mike aches with it.

They take the body out of the cabinet. There is absolutely no one around, but even if there were, from a distance it could almost pass for camping equipment, a folded up tent maybe. They set it down near the door to the clubhouse, and Bill looks almost heartbroken.

“It’s so fucking un-f-f-f-f- _fair_ ,” he says, raking a hand through his hair. “You built this place for us. You were _twelve_ and you _made_ this. It was our place and he’s _taking_ it from us. He’s _still_ fucking ruining our lives.”

Ben shakes his head, leaning back on his heels to look up at the canopy of trees.

“I built it to keep us safe from him,” he says, and squeeze Bill’s arm with a lopsided smile. “Let it do its job, Bill.”

They set up a little campfire nearby to explain the smoke, pull over some logs, the s’mores fixing sitting untouched in their plastic bag. Ben goes back to the car to get the tools, and when he comes back, he stops short of the door Mike’s pried open.

“So. I don’t think I can go in there again,” Ben says, looking down into the clubhouse, his face bloodless and sheened with sweat. “In the caves, It…I was in there, and it…I don’t think I can go in.” Mike can hear his breathing, shallow pants that still set his chest heaving.

“It’s okay,” Mike says, pulling him away by the elbow, hands and voice gentle. “We can do this part.” It’s nice to do something to make Ben’s life easier for a change.

In the end, Bill goes in because Mike can’t really saw while bent in half so he doesn’t brain himself, and Ben calls down instructions for where to cut into each support beam. Then Bill soaks each piece of wood in as much kerosene as he can, and makes little trails of it leading to the center of the space, with little paths made of tinder Mike hands down alongside. It takes forever and Bill looks a little high on the fumes by the time Mike and Ben reach down to haul him up.

Mike steadies him, hand splayed across Bill’s ribs as he gets his balance, little finger brushing just a sliver of bare skin where his shirt rides up. Bill’s breath is heavy is in his ear. He locks it away in his mind, adds it to the small collection of gleaming jewels he’ll keep from the past two days, something to take out when he’s alone. Something to hold up to the light, to _prove_ that there _is_ light. Or least, there _was_ light. For a few days there was light.

They push the body in last, the three of them staring down into the dark maw of earth while Bill squeezes out the second kerosene bottle over the vague lump below until it’s empty. He tosses the bottle in, too.

“Ready?”

They nod. They each light a match and let it drop. Nothing happens for a moment. Ben starts lighting another match, when the flames whisper to life, slithering in orange rivulets in the dark. Once it’s burning in earnest, Ben wedges the door back into place, sweeps the moss and leaves back over it, packs it in. Then they draw back, sitting around their little campfire

“It won’t collapse in right away,” Ben says, sounding comfortingly certain. “We’ll be here for a couple hours.” But Ben is as good a reverse-engineer as he is an architect, and after an hour and a half there’s a strange rattle beneath their feet, like someone is operating machinery nearby. There’s a muffled series of _thunk_ s and they scrabble back, the fire throwing up swarms of sparks and the ground in front of them sinks like a ruined soufflé.

“Did it work?” Bill asks, eyes huge, the blue shadowed and indeterminate in the fading light. Ben creeps forward and flips the hatch open with a stick, Mike keeping a tight grip of the back of his shirt in case the ground shifts again. The hatch opens and a small mushroom cloud of smoke pours out and then—nothing. Ben peers in, hair falling in his face.

“It worked,” he says, his voice a sigh of exhaustion, his shoulders wilting. “There’s just dirt inside. It worked.” Mike yanks him back, and Ben’s grin is lopsided, but real. “No one’s finding him in there.”

Bill laughs, slightly hysterical and flings his arms around Mike. Mike can feel Bill’s nose brush against the sensitive skin of his neck, freezing cold, bright as an electric shock.

“You’re safe,” Bill breathes, “Richie’s safe. Holy shit. Holy _shit_.” He pulls back to smile at Mike, eyes wild, and bright like he’s been drinking, and Mike has a sudden, reeling sense of dislocation, feels the phantom press of Bill’s forehead to his own, the sigh of relief that washed over him like a breaking wave.

That flickering, secret thought in the base of his brain gutters. He pulls away, looking at Ben.

“What was the tape for?”

Ben shrugs. “It’s good to have around. Especially if you’re moving furniture, you can tape drawers shut and stuff without wrecking the finish.”

Mike blinks at him for a long moment, then throws his head back and laughs, the sound like a language he’s just starting to remember.

He can feel Bill looking at him, even with his eyes closed.

He wakes up and doesn’t know where he is. No skylight, and the ceiling is plaster, not boards, crisscrossed with polished wood beams. The Townhouse. They had agreed that they needed to sleep for just a bit so they could be useful at the hospital, and Bill had insisted Mike should just come with them and the Townhouse was closer than the library, and anyway, it would just be for a couple hours. He can tell from the way his neck is trying to secede from his body that it was absolutely not just a couple of hours.

He has _no_ memory of getting from the car to the Townhouse. Who’s _bed_ is he in? The pillow smells nice, faintly floral under the heavy sleep smell, which makes him think Bev. Probably she slept in Ben’s room. The thought makes him smile. Good for Bev. Good for Ben. He rolls onto his back, a screeching-metal ripple effect moving down his body, and bends his neck a little, experimentally. It _pops_ with a sound like a snapped glow stick, and a _zing!_ races down his nerve like an electric current, so hard and so sharp he can feel it in his _elbow_ , like someone stuck him with a pin there.

“ _Jesus_ ,” he hisses, frankly afraid of what happens if he tries to sit up. As if summoned by his old man distress, the doorknob rattles and the door swings open. Bev is holding two mugs of coffee precariously as she nudges the door open all the way with her hip.

“Oh good, you’re up,” she says, her voice still morning-rough even though her eyes are bright and clear. A curl of red hair, still damp from the shower, falls across her face and she tosses her head to get rid of it as she sits carefully on the foot of the bed next to him and slides a mug onto the nightstand. “I was feeling really bad about having to wake you up. Do you like sweet or not-sweet?” She holds up her coffee mug, eyebrows tilted in question.

“Sweet,” he admits, pushing himself up against the headboard. He’s still in his clothes from yesterday (and the day before, technically), and he’s suddenly aware of the aching furrows the seams of his jeans and shirt have dug into his skin.

“I knew it,” Bev says, smug, and nudges the mug on the nightstand a little closer to him. He takes a hesitant sip, tastes sugar and something that might be artificial hazelnut, and then drains half of it before flopping his head back with a sigh.

“How long was I out?”

“About twelve hours. I would’ve let you make it a lucky thirteen, but I didn’t know if you wanted to shower here or at home.”

“I should stop at my place,” he admits, something between resignation and dread squirming in his guts at the thought. “I should really change clothes.”

Bev nods, like she thought of that.

“Richie and Ben said you can borrow any of their clothes if you want, and I said they were both very sweet and had no idea how tall you actually are.”

Mike laughs at that, and then at the idea of himself in one of Richie’s horrible button-up shirts. They sip their coffee in silence for a while, Bev pulling up her legs to sit pretzel-style against his leg. This was something the two of them had always shared, he remembers, the only ones out of all the Losers who actually drank coffee as a matter of course in the mornings. To wake up, mostly, too young still to really enjoy the taste, passing his thermos back and forth on sleepy mornings. The first few times, Richie had demanded a taste, too, and then Eddie had to try because Richie said he wouldn’t like it, and then everyone had demanded a sip and pretended they didn’t think it was disgusting. When it immediately became clear that coffee made Richie and Eddie absolutely _deranged_ , Mike had put his foot gently but firmly down and refused to share with anyone but Bev “because she could handle the responsibility.”

“My car’s still at the library,” he says, mostly thinking aloud. “I can just walk over.”

“No, I’ll drive you when you’ve finished your coffee,” Bev says easily. “You can meet us at the hospital when you’re ready.” She reaches out and pats his knee for no apparent reason. He smiles, heart squeezing with an affection so sharp it’s almost pain. They spend a few more minutes sipping their coffee in easy silence, the little room feeling pocketed in time, and really, they could be any age at all.

“You seem like you’re doing…really well,” Mike says, and he wish it didn’t come out like that’s a bad thing. “Like, _really_ well.”

Eddie is still pale where he’s propped up against his pillows, but his color is already better, not the chalky almost-green of yesterday. He’s still clearly a little doped up, but his eyes are bright and alert. He looks grumpy, which is deeply reassuring, the world tilting back onto its axis.

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Richie snaps from where he’s hunched over a breakfast sandwich Ben brought them in a huge, greasy bag. Richie, actually, looks only fractionally better than Eddie, who was quite recently impaled and then flattened by graywater. He hasn’t left the hospital since he first arrived, barely straying from Eddie’s room, and doesn’t look like he’s slept even a little. He also smells, but if Eddie hasn’t noticed that yet, Mike is absolutely not going to be the one to point it out.

“It means,” Mike says slowly, crumpling the foil wrapping from his Egg McMuffin between his hands, “I think it’s connected. Remember what happened with our scars?” He holds his hand up, spreads the fingers wide. Bill slops a little McDonald’s coffee down his front and shuffles off to dab at his shirt in the room’s sink, swearing under his breath. “They healed when we…defeated It.” He keeps his voice low, and the others lean in around him. “I think when we all swore to come back, when we made the blood oath, we…bound ourselves to It somehow. Or we bound It to us.”

“So when we killed It,” Bev says in a stage whisper. “We—what? _Undid_ what It had done?”

“But if that’s true, then why aren’t there b-b-bodies up and walking around all over?.” Bill asks, patting at his shirt with a paper towel. “There would be hundreds.”

“Because we only bound It to _us_ ,” Mike said. “It had to abide by the rules of the shape it inhabited. We changed the rules.”

“But Eddie was—“ Ben glances at him and mouths, “Eddie was _dead_.” Eddie gives a dismissive little wave of one limp hand, _yes, yes, it’s true, carry on_. Richie shoves his sandwich away from him in disgust. “We _saw_. How could he have healed from that?”

Mike steepled his fingers, thinking.

“If what It had done, to us, at least, began to be _un_ done the second It died…if Eddie started healing _that second_ …we never took his pulse.”

“If I wasn’t all-the-way-dead,” Eddie agrees, looking alarmingly casual as he contemplates the exact timing of his heartbeat actually, _technically_ stopping, like it’s an annoying calculation he’s crunching. “Even if I just had a _bit_ of a pulse, then it was enough to keep me alive. That makes sense. You know—“ He makes another little _to the degree that any of this absolute fucking insanity makes sense_ gesture.

Richie stands up, his chair scraping against the floor, and walks out of the room, flinging the door so hard it bounces off the rubber stopper on the wall. 

“Richie, what the fuck, man?” Bill says, annoyed. Richie turns on his heel and strides back into the room, shoving the door again as it swings back towards him.

“ _Fuck_ you, that’s what the fuck. Fuck every fucking one of you, god _damnit_.” His lips are pulled back from his teeth like an animal, and Mike _remembers_ suddenly, how Richie’s eyes would go dead like that, sometimes, how every now and then his joke would have edges that _cut_.

“Richie—” Bev starts to get up, reaching for him, but he shrugs her off. She flinches, just a little, and Ben’s standing suddenly, his voice a low rumble.

“That’s _enough_.” Bev tugs on his arm, shaking her head.

“No, no it’s not _fucking enough_ , Haystack,” Richie snarls, and the nickname never sounded _mean_ before. A muscle jumps in Ben’s jaw, and Mike really does not want to put Richie in a sleeper hold, but he’ll do it if he has to. “You’re all _fucking_ assholes.”

“What’s this about, Rich?” Mike says, voice steady and quiet, like he’s trying to calm a frightened animal. Richie turns on him, his eyes a furious chemical blue in the overhead light.

“ _YOU MADE ME LEAVE HIM THERE!_ ” He screams. His voice is anguished. Heartbroken, Mike realizes. Richie is heartbroken.

“Yeah, obviously,” Eddie cuts in, looking incredulous. Richie’s mouth hangs open like a screen door, loose on its hinges. “You thought I was _dead_. And even if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been able to carry me.”

“Together we could have —“

“150 pounds of dead weight? Walking backwards through a collapsing cave system, each of you with a leg and an arm?”

“ _Yes!_ ” Richie shoves his hands in his hair and its so saturated with dirt and oil that it just stays like, sticking out from his head in tufts.

“Please,” Eddie scoffs. “You’d all have died. The whole _point_ was so you wouldn’t die, Richie. I _decided_. Bill said, ‘Do you want Richie to die, too?’ And I decided for _myself_ that absolutely the fuck not, so I shanked an alien hell clown and it shanked me back. And I’d fucking do it again, shithead, so stop being so goddamn dramatic about it.”

“‘ _Dramatic?_ ’” Richie says, his voice pitching higher and louder with every syllable. “About leaving you for _dead?_ ”

“When I can make a fist again, I’m gonna punch you in the _dick_ ,” Eddie shouts back, and any minute now a nurse is absolutely going to yell at them.

As if on cue, a woman with a neat bob and glasses opens the door and pauses at the dramatic tableau they’re presenting. They all freeze, even Richie, his arms outstretched, eyes crazy, all of them twelve years old and in trouble again.

“Pardon me,” she says, her eyes sweeping over them, uncertain. A dark-haired man hurries in behind her and it’s Stan.

“Hello everyone, I’d like to apologize for being late,” he says in his same precise voice and Richie screams, throws up, and passes out cold. The whole process takes less than a minute. 

“You were right, I probably should have waited in the hall,” Stan says, frowning down at Richie’s splayed legs. The woman pats his shoulder.

“Well, now we know for next time,” she says comfortingly.

They’re frozen, paralyzed, the only sound in the room is the frantic blip of the heart monitor.

Finally, Eddie throws his hands in the air with a snarl. “You couldn’t let me shine just this once, Stanley?” He grouses. “Coming back from the dead couldn't just be _my_ thing?”

Mike doesn’t remember standing up, but his arms wrap tight around Stan, anchoring him in this moment, and Mike says another prayer, and another, and another. _Thank you_. _Thank you. Thank you._

_Thank you._

Nurses tend to fall into one of two archetypes, Mike’s finding. The first is perpetually about twenty-eight, with glossy ponytails, and wear solid-colored jewel-toned scrubs with Crocs. The other is about fifty-five with smock-style scrubs with a cheerful pattern. They wear orthopedic sneakers and generally have a perm. Marcia is the latter model, and after she helps them scrape both Richie and his vomit up off the floor, she explains in a very cheerful voice completely at odds with her deadly serious expression that they are going to need to leave Eddie to rest now, since too much excitement—she fixes Richie with a look that has him squirming in place—is detrimental to his impalement recovery.

They all nod and shuffle out into the waiting room, shamefaced, and wait exactly long enough for her to turn a corner out of sight, and then immediately bolt back into Eddie’s room.

“That phone call,” Bev starts, “We just assumed—we never should have just believed—“ She looks at them helplessly. How to talk around the clown?

“I’m so sorry,” says Patty Blum-Uris, schoolteacher, married to Stanley Uris, alive. “I had to be sedated when they took Stan to the hospital. I didn’t even remember making that phone call until the next day and then no one was picking up for me to explain—“ 

“You’ve been calling?” Mike asks, checking his phone. No new calls except from Bev. No voicemails.

“The line would just ring and go dead,” Patty says, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Fucking Derry,” Richie says, and takes another swig of water from a paper cup, swishing it around his mouth and spitting into the sink.

“He was—“ Patty starts and stops. She doesn’t strike Mike as someone who is usually at a loss for words, or imprecise with language. There is thoughtfulness to her that makes Mike immediately fond of her, and that same sense of almost-familiarity as seeing _Hansom & Associates_ in neat, bold lettering. Of course this is who Stan married. Of _course_.

“I was clinically dead for less than a minute,” Stan fills in. “I did, technically, pass. I just came back immediately after.”

“So you really…” Bev trails off, biting her lip. She very carefully does not glances at the white bandages peeking out of the cuffs of Stan’s sweater. Stan’s lips quirk up in a wry little smile.

“Yes.”

“Oh honey,” Bev breathes.

“It’s okay, Beverly,” he says. “It seemed like the best plan of action at the time. It wasn’t. I course corrected. I would have come as soon as I woke up, but I was on a mandatory forty-eight hour psychiatric hold.”

Bev puts her face in her hands, elbows on her knees where she’s sitting on the foot of Eddie’s hospital bed. Eddie tries to pat her shoulder, but presumably his painkillers are in full effect because he just sort of flaps his hand at her like a seal.

“Well, I had tried to kill myself and then when I regained consciousness I kept talking about a clown,” Stan says with a shrug. "They thought I had a psychotic break.” 

They all freeze, eyes skittering between him and Patty.

“Oh, Patty knows,” Stan says at their looks of faint panic. “We don’t keep secrets.”

“So she knows about…” Bill tries, and then visibly panics halfway through the question.

“The demon clown that terrorized us as children and murdered about half of our classmates, yes.”

“Ah,” Bill says, voice casual.

“It was maybe also an alien now,” Richie adds helpfully. 

“…Was?” Stan asks, looking at Mike for some reason instead of Bill. Mike drinks in the sight of his new, adult face—the elegant lines of him, those same sharp cheekbones, the indeterminate blue of his eyes, how watchful he still is, how contained. Mikes lets the smile spread slow and easy across his face.

“We did it, Stan the Man,” he says, his voice clear, and steady. “We killed It. For real, this time. It’s over.”

Stan nods, his expression thoughtful, and folds over and sticks his head between his knees. Patty puts her hand flat across his neck.

“I would like someone to hold my hand, please,” his muffled voice says to the floor. Mike crouches down next to his chair, knees creaking, and envelops Stan’s fingers in his, careful not to bump against his wrist.

“I got you, buddy.”

“Thank you, Mike,” comes Stan’s voice.

“Anytime.”

“I’m gonna need a minute.”

“Take your time.” Mike says, giving Stan’s hand a gentle squeeze. Stan squeezes back, twice, quickly, and Mike smiles. He remembers that game. “We’re not going anywhere.”

(That candle flickers in Mike’s brain once again. Once again he hides it from view.)

Eventually Stan surfaces, and continues as if he never paused. “I was panicking. I didn’t think it through clearly. Well, I did, obviously, but I—“

And oh, he had forgotten that look, Stanley’s face while he tried to figure out exactly what he meant, how he would speak when he was certain, and not a moment before. “I knew I wasn’t brave enough to go back, to Neibolt. And I knew that because of that, because of me, you wouldn’t be able to kill It. So I took myself out of the equation. I was…very distressed, when I realized I’d fucked it up.”

Richie blinks, eyes huge. Stanley, swearing!

“I tried to leave as soon as I woke up, to get here, because I knew if I was still alive then you needed me. It was difficult for the staff to get me to calm down enough that I could ask Patty to take me.” Stan does that funny sour thing with his mouth that means he’s deeply, deeply upset.

“Honey, I feel strange reassuring you of this,” Patty says, “but you did everything—not _right_ , I won’t say that, but you did everything _correctly_ to achieve your intended goal, to save them. It was total chance that my top got dirty and had to come home to change. Complete dumb luck. Do you know what happened?” She smiles, and it’s like the sun coming up. How could Stan _not_ marry her? How could anyone? “A bird pooped on me. Right on the shoulder of my blouse, and I thought, ‘Stanley will love this! This will genuinely delight my husband, and he will want to know what kind of bird it was.’ Dumb luck. That perfect, wonderful bird.”

And he still knows, somehow, that Stan isn’t terribly religious, only maybe halfway observant, but he looks at Patty and kisses her knuckles and says something in Hebrew, softly, a prayer if ever Mike heard one. He catches the word for God, he thinks, but that’s it. He gets the gist, though. 

“Patty checked me out, against doctors orders.” He kisses her hand. 

“Stan wrote me an extremely thorough letter, explaining why he was doing what he was doing. I understood his thought process, to an extent.” She looks into the middle distance, remembering. “I would have still accepted that he had suffered a psychotic break. It’s late for schizophrenia to present, but not unheard of. Those things are hard to accept in everyday life, but they do seem more reasonable that the clown monster.” There is a “ _but"_ coming. “But the scars on his face, the one on his hand...I watched them _fade_ and then...disappear. Like nothing. Like they were never there. I _saw_ them. So I signed him out. And booked us a flight.”

“You know, I think it did work, Stanley,” Mike says slowly. “And it wouldn’t have if Patty hadn’t called. We _believed_ it was true, so it was. It believed it, too.”

“You still saved us, Stan,” Bev says, and Stan has to take another moment. Mike puts a hand back across his shoulders, marveling all over again at the rise and fall of his breath.

Eddie is healing too fast— _startlingly_ fast, it’s _noticeable_.

“The numbers in his chart are all way, way off base,” a doctor snaps at Marcia while running some tests or something on Eddie. “If these were his numbers, he’d be unconscious, he’d be half _dead._ ” Mike frowns, crossing his arms. Marcia’s a good nurse, she doesn’t deserve this. Marcia patiently waits through the doctor’s snippy little dressing-down, a look of serene patience on her face that lets Mike know Marcia is capable of killing a man.

“Epic must be glitching again,” she says easily. The doctor seems somewhat mollified by this, blusters off somewhere else in a swish of white coat. Marcia says nothing, but she stares at Eddie’s chart for a long moment, frowning, and—she blinks, her face clearing, and shrugs. The fucking Derry Effect.

“You should probably check out of here before too much longer,” Mike tells Eddie, who is looking almost perky aside from the sallow skin and the deep hollows under his eyes, which honestly were kind of there before.

“It figures Dr. K would find a way to be _too_ healthy,” says Richie from where he’s propped up against a wall, barely awake. It is astonishing, actually, that Richie is still upright, seeing as Mike’s pretty sure he’s running on three hours sleep out of the last thirty-six. He looks _awful_ , skin greasy, stubble shading his jaw. Eddie is scowling at him while he sips juice out of a straw. “It’s like that _Twilight Zone_ with the guy who wants time to read.”

“Eddie,” Ben says abruptly, like he’s been psyching himself up for what he wants to ask. Eddie snaps his jaw shut from getting ready to yell at Richie some more, his big, startled eyes making him look exactly like a wounded deer. “I was listed as your emergency contact...” Ben lets the implied question trail off.

“Yeah, I, uh—“ Eddie scratches at his chin, nails scraping against the stubble that’s starting there. “I have a...close working relationship with my insurance company cause of my job, and I…switched it. That day. In the Townhouse. After Bowers...I came down the stairs and I said he was in my bathroom and you fucking _launched_ yourself in there and I just thought ‘Oh good, Ben’s got it.’ Like when we were kids. ‘Ben said he fixed it, so it’s safe.’ Bev was holding my face together and I thought, ‘If I have to go to the hospital for this, I _really_ don’t want my wife to know,’ and then I just thought ‘Ben’ll fix it. I just…sorry, I should have asked—”

“It’s fine,” Ben cuts him off, his cheeks appleing in a smile. That same Ben look, the same startled pleasure in being noticed.

Richie sinks down against the wall, his jaw doing something that looks painful. Mike wants to tell him that he gets it, that once he was seeing a guy in Bangor, and he wasn’t a boyfriend, but he could have been. He had wanted to be. But even if Mike could have explained that they needed to live in Derry and never move for twelve more years, he never could have explained why, a part of himself always veiled, locked away. So much of him has never belonged to anyone but them. Never will, probably. He gets it. He knows.

Ben was the one to kiss Beverly back to them, maybe not because his love was the truest, but because Ben saw _who Beverly was_ in a way they couldn’t, or to a depth they couldn’t reach. Ben didn’t tell Beverly he _loved_ her with that kiss, he told her he loved _her_. He reminded her who she was, _really_ was, underneath the all the layers of grime other people had tried to smear across her heart, her mind. He showed her what was worth loving about her, and it was everything.

Mike’s not sure anyone could have woken him up from the Deadlights.

The day drags by in stutter steps, more bewildered nurse checkups, damp sandwiches in little plastic boxes, all those endless cups of coffee. Stan and Patty debate getting a room at the Townhouse.

“Just stay in one of our rooms,” Bev says. “I’ll be in Ben’s room, Mike can take mine, Richie can stay in Eddie’s.”

“The hotel is apparently run by g-g-g—ghosts, anyway,” Bill says, flushing. “I should do something with that. Ghost hotel.”

Stan is still looking back and forth between Ben and Bev, his eyes thoughtful as he glances at Mike. Mike winks and his eyes widen slightly, the corner of his mouth quirking up.

“What’d you m—“ Eddie starts, them stops when they all look at him. “Um.” His eyes go wide and panicky. “Mike, can I use your phone?” Eddie asks, his voice creaky. He looks sick again. “I need to call my wife.”

“Of course,” Mike says, fishing his phone out of his pocket and unlocking it for Eddie. “Take your time.”

Richie does not send the door flying again, but he opens and closes it with such excite care that it is very, very clear that he wants to. They all shuffle out into the hall after him, giving Eddie some privacy.

“How long has that been going on?” Stan asks, his voice low enough that only Mike can hear.

“Ben and Beverly?”

“Sure.”

“Like, a day and half?”

“Interesting,” Stan says, and tucks his hands into his cardigan pockets.

They get more watery hospital coffee, Mike’s chalky with creamer and sickly sweet, and walk around taking in the hospital’s collection of tasteful landscape prints for half an hour. When they come back, Eddie looks almost…manic, his eyes feverish they’re so bright, almost hyperventilating.

“Hey, breathe,” Richie orders, hunching over him. “Or your heart thing’s gonna get Marcia back in here to yell at us.” Eddie sucks in air like someone who’s practiced breathing exercises, all of them watching him tensely until his heart monitor creeps back down into normal range.

“I guess Spaghetti’s in the doghouse,” Richie says, his smile a grimace, more of a baring of teeth.

“Oh my god, I am begging you to shut the fuck up,” Eddie hisses, throwing a straw at him. Richie lets it hit him, sulking. They sit or stand in uncomfortable silence for a long minute.

“Where do you live, Beverly?” Patty asks, her bob brushing against her cheek as she tilts her head, questioning, like a bird.

“Chicago, but—“ Bev frowns, runs her thumb over the pale skin of her ring finger. “I’m moving. With Ben.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Patty says, sounding genuinely pleased. “Where does Ben live?”

Bev quirks her eyebrows at him in question.

“Nebraska,” Ben gets out, blushing furiously. “Most of the year. Part of the year. I—uh—yeah.” Bev snakes her fingers in between his, and Ben beams at her. The back of Mike’s hands feel cold.

“What about you, Mike?” Patty asks. Next to her, Stan is frowning a little, his eyes watchful.

“I live here,” Mike says. “I’ve always lived here."

“You can go anywhere you want now,” Bill says, somewhere Mike can’t see, the room is tunneling in his vision. “Do you still want to go to Florida?”

Mike read somewhere that the human eye is supposed to be able to detect a candle’s flame in the dark up to thirty miles away. That’s how far away the secret wish he’s been hiding, that flickering pinprick of hope in his mind, feels as it blazes and snuffs out.

Blood rushes in his ears, the overhead lights seeming to flare and fade. He leans back, his head bumping a cabinet door too hard, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, so hard black-red Rorschach flowers bloom against his eyelids.

“Mike?” He can’t tell whose voice it is, his pulse is too loud, an ocean-swell crush in his ears. He shakes his head. This is how it starts. Or rather, this is how it will end.

“Mike, what is it, what’s wrong?”

He slides down the row of cabinets until he’s on the ground.

“Mike, _Mikey_ , what’s _wrong?_ ”

“I’m afraid you’re going to go away and forget me.” He says, because why lie? Why lie about any of it anymore? “Actually, no, I’m afraid you’re going to go away and you’ll remember me, but you just won’t _care_.” They will leave. He can see it, unspooling like a bolt of cloth in front of him: he will take that first sip of despair and the light around him will get dimmer and dimmer until one day it will be gone and he will drink deep and then he will die.

Maybe it will be fast, Stanley’s voice shaking on the phone, or maybe he will just be sad and alone for the rest of his natural life because he no longer knows how to be anything else. This is how it starts. This is how it will end.

Someone is pulling his hands away from his face, the touch gentle, but very strong. Not quite workman’s hands, but near enough. Mike opens his eyes, reluctantly, and Ben’s eyes are boring into him, pinning him in place.

Ben touches one hand to his own shirt, where these days Mike knows his ribs present themselves for counting. “It’s still there. I checked, after all our scars disappeared. I thought maybe…” He shakes his head, a hank of hair falling in his eyes. He leaves it there, both hands banded around Mike’s wrists again. “I wasn’t surprised, though, because it just confirmed what I already knew: Bowers was a fucking psychopath. It maybe have nudged him, but It never _made_ him do anything—It just let him do what he already wanted. It liked to scare us with lies that we were afraid were true, but Bowers was real.”

Mike feels like he's floating out of his body, the only thing holding him back from drifting up to the ceiling is Ben, his eyes, his strong, good hands.

“When Bowers cut me, It made me see a car driving past, real slow, so I could see the people inside realize what was happening to me and just keep driving.” Mike remembers Ben’s sweet, round child’s face, as soft as a baby bird, and feels a phantom stab of protective anger. Who could ever want to hurt Ben?

Ben reaches up one hand to cup Mike’s face, a thumb sweeping across his cheekbone, like he’s brushing tears away even though Mike doesn’t think he’s crying yet.

“The lie was never that Bowers was going to kill me, the lie was that nobody _cared._ It made me believe that Bowers could cut me open on the street and no one would ever do anything to save me, because I didn’t deserve it. It made me believe I was alone. But it was a _lie,_ Mike.”

“Ben wasn’t alone.” Bill’s voice in his ear, so close. “And neither are you. You never will be again.” Mike can’t turn to look at him or he will blow apart like a dandelion, unspool like lace. He can feel Stanley’s hand on his shoulder.

“It’s cute you think you can fucking get rid of us now that we ritualistically bathed in shitty pond water together,” Richie says, kicking Mike’s ankle lightly. “That shit’s herpes, man. It’s for _life._ ”

“I would just like to say that I think it’s incredibly shitty of all of you to have this moment together on the fucking ground where I can’t fucking see you because I am fucking bedridden,” Eddie pipes in. It startles a laugh out of Mike, thick and snuffly, and a spattering of laughter ripples through the others, compulsive. Bev holds out her hand, and he lets her pull him up, both of them nearly teetering over in the process. Mike half-stumbles three steps over to Eddie’s bed, and sits down in a graceless heap.

“Listen,” Bev says, and Mike’s heart, battered though it is, perks up its head like a dog because, still, from just one word, it can tell Beverly Marsh is about to suggest something crazy. “Mike wants to go to Florida? Let’s go to fucking Florida.”

There is a startled moment of silence, and then Mike blurts out, “I can’t—“ and Eddie kicks him. Very weakly, but _right_ in the kidney, that little _gremlin_.

“Michael, I just blew up my entire life while you guys were getting coffee, and if I don’t get out of here soon, the fucking Derry Effect is gonna wear off and they’ll put me in a government lab for being a freak of nature.”

“You _are_ a freak of nature.”

“Fuck _off,_ Richie, I swear to Christ! I got stabbed, I’m getting divorced, I want a vacation, fucking sue me.”

Richie sputters, mouth gaping like a fish, for once in his life without a comeback.

“Aw hey, me too,” Bev says. “Divorce buddies.”

“I am not getting divorced,” Stan says calmly.

“Oh good,” Patty says, patting his knee. “I do think you should go to Florida with them, though.”

“Are you sure, babylove?” Stan asks, his expression serious as he takes her hand. ( _“‘Babylove?!_ ’” Richie shrieks, and Bill elbows him in the ribs.)

“I mean, I don’t love it, you being away, right after—but you said it was important for you all to be together. I think you were right.”

“What if you came with us, Patty?” Bev cuts in. Stan’s face brightens, and _there_ he is, there’s Stan the Man, the lines of him as crisp and neat as folded paper.

“I would have stop home first,” she says thoughtfully, “We left in a rush.”

“You could come down after a few days,” Stan says, eyes unfocused, thinking aloud. “We could fly home together.”

“This is insane, guys,” Mike says loudly, cutting them off. ”You can’t just—I can’t let you—”

“Mike, you stayed in this goddamn town for twenty-seven years for us,” Richie snaps. “Let us do one fucking thing for you. Let the sad rich people try to buy back your love like absentee parents. Milk this shit.”

“I can’t accept—“

“To be perfectly honest with you all,” Ben says, talking over him. “I have a lot of money and I’m really lonely most of the time. Please let me buy us an Airbnb in Florida.”

Mike turns to Bill, helpless. Bill just grins at him, eyes crazy.

“I’m in disgrace with basically everyone else I know. This is perfect. You’d be doing me a _favor_ , Mikey.”

And Bev must know, the way she always knows, that Mike’s never been able to deny Bill anything. She whoops, and tosses her arms around him. Her hair fills up his field of vision, the same color as if he were looking at the sun through his eyelids.

The plan is to leave the next day, after Eddie checks himself out of the hospital. They’ll drive down the coast, stay in a hotel along the way, twice if they drive slow. Ben says it will be fine if they arrive late. Patty will fly back home tomorrow, she and Stan will stay the night at the Townhouse in Richie’s room. Plans, spreading like ink across the blank white paper of his future that had laid untouched for so long.

He walks back to the library from the hospital. He wants to feel the earth under his feet. He wants to walk the perimeter of his world one more time before it expands.

The accumulation of his life means that he can’t actually just leave without setting his house more or less in order. Or if he _can_ , then maybe he doesn’t _want_ to. Maybe he doesn’t want to burn _everything_ down behind him. He can turn over the earth without salting it. A fallow field can be planted, later, by someone who’s been given seeds.

He packs up his two suitcases with his lightest clothes. He empties out his fridge and garbage cans, sweeps up piles of dust that have gone ignored in corners. He calls Edith, the retired librarian, to cover for him for two weeks. She’s cantankerous and brusque, but Mike’s always liked her, and she’s always bored enough to be pleased to fill in, no matter how much she pretends to complain.

He spends the rest of the day filling book requests he’s been ignoring (Mike is a very good librarian when it’s not a clown year, he’s not always like this). He smiles when he gets to his very favorite patron on the computerized list.

It had been two years ago and he had been paying his weekly dues behind the circulation desk, when the world’s tiniest, grumpiest girl-child had plunked down a copy of _Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit_ and _To The Lighthouse_ and said, “It’s for a book report,” with the steely-eyed intensity that said Mike could waterboard her and she still wouldn’t talk. Mike had smiled as casually as he physically could, trying to radiate both the utter disinterest for which the world's tiniest lesbian was so clearly praying to any god that would have her, and also the Warm Accepting Adult Who Won’t Narc On You vibe he firmly believes every chid should have access to.

The fact that she was dressed exactly— _exactly_ —like Richie had as a kid was just. Too much. _One day Richie is gonna die laughing about this_ , he had thought, so clearly it had almost hurt.

He keeps about a dozen local newsletters out for free in the enclosed entrance of library, a mix of community groups and a few poetry zines and a thin LGBTQ magazine for the greater Maine area. Every month, without fail, the Tiniest Lesbian will collect exactly one of every newsletter in a big pile, snatching up an interview with quasi-local gay business owners in between copies of local birdwatching logs and information about fracking. Despite her very best efforts, she is about as subtle as brick to the head. Mike loves her.

He selects copies of _We Are Okay, Wonders of the Invisible World_ , and _Dante and Aristotle Discover The Secrets of the Universe_ , and puts them with the Tiniest Lesbian’s other holds on the shelf, so whenever the library reopens, they’ll be there for her, if she wants them. So she knows the world gets bigger, eventually. That it’s waiting for her, too.

The next two days pass in a blur. Mike dreams across state lines, his head against the windows of his own car, Bill watching traffic with laser focus, muttering, “I’m still not completely used to driving on this side of the road.” Richie’s rented convertible, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and humming along to the radio as Mike swims in and out of sleep, _after all it was a great big world, with lots of places to run to_. Ben’s rented SUV, Bev driving with the windows down, Stanley speaking lowly in the back seat. There is a hotel, or maybe Mike dreams it, the seven of them spread out across two queen beds, Ben and Richie on the floor, pillows tucked under their heads, Bill curled up on the couch, Stan breathing next to Mike on the bed, mumbling in the dark.

Maybe he’s catching up on days of lost sleep, years of it, decades. Maybe his mind is trying to protect itself, wrap him safe in cottony dreamspace so he can’t second guess this, can’t worry it into a problem instead of letting it be a life vest, clicking into place around him.

He blinks awake when someone opens the car door. They’ve stopped, it’s bright outside, and it takes a long, sleepy moment for Mike’s eyes to focus. The Losers are standing around outside the open car door in a tight horseshoe like they’re trying to hiding someone sneaking in a birthday cake.

“Wake up, Mikey,” Bill says, and Mike can hear the smile in his voice even before his face comes into focus. “We’re here.”

The others pull back a little bit and Mike becomes aware, for the first time, of the heat, an almost solid thing around him, like it could hold him up like water. Like it could take the weight of him.

He shrugs out of his jacket and something else comes off with it, something so heavy that just _lifts_ , an old skin ready to be left behind. Bill is holding out a hand to him, and behind him he can see palm trees swaying and the Florida sky is the only thing Mike has ever seen that is bluer than Bill’s eyes.

Mike takes his hand and steps out into the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> the poem Mike remembers is "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" by Galway Kinnell


End file.
